Forum:How to deal with new volume numbering scheme in the Chronology and elsewhere on this wiki
Now that the Foglios are done with their vacation, it appears that the long promised "part 2" of the story is beginning. The first page published after their return ( ) is identified as "GG Act. 2 Vol. 01 Page 001". This presents a problem for this wiki in that it breaks the numbering scheme for the volumes of the story used in the Chronology and elsewhere so far, which has been to use the number of the volume in Roman numeral form. Now the "act" or part of the story has to be identified, as well as the volume number. It isn't clear if the Foglios are using "acts" as the official name of the parts of the story or if it serves as a kind of placeholder. In an email sent to me a few years ago, in response to a question about the "end of the first part of the story," Alice Bentley said, "There is some talk of changing the format of the titles for future volumes, to make it easier for new readers to jump in midway, but we are a long way from needing to decide how to package Vol. 13, so there's lots of time to work out how that's best done." (This was when the Foglios still though volume 12 was going to be the end of part 1 of the story, so "Vol. 13" in Alice's quote should really be Vol. 14.) So perhaps we can look forward to something like Agatha Goes to Paris: The Travels of Agatha Heterodyne, Volume 1 as the name of this new work. Be that as it may, some things need to be decided. Do we use something as simple as prefixing the volume numbers of Act 2 with a Roman numeral II, e.g, II-I? If so, do we retrofit the previous volumes numbers with a Roman numeral I prefix, e.g., I-I, I-IV, I-XIII, etc.? I am not sure why Roman numerals were selected for volume numbers in this wiki; I dislike them personally and would rather see Arabic numerals used myself. Perhaps this is an opportunity to make such a change? Another possibility is to just keep going as we have been and call the new volume number XIV, but that seems to likely to cause enormous confusion in the future. This message is just an attempt to get a discussion started. I welcome any suggestions that are better than the sketchy ones I've made. -- William Ansley (talk) 22:41, March 4, 2014 (UTC) : I'd suggest using "2-1" for the volume identifier for the new volume—does that break anything? Argadi (talk) 09:41, March 5, 2014 (UTC) :: I'm probably making too much of this. I know it's not rocket science, but I felt it would be best to draw upon the collective wisdom of the wiki before making any unilateral changes. I support using "2-1" for new volume. Do you know why Roman numerals have been used for past volume identifiers? It would save space in the various tables and lists if all volume numbers were switched to Arabic numerals. Of course, that would mean adding a "1-" prefix to all the volume numbers from act 1, which would negate some of the space savings, but I would still like to see it done for the sake of consistency. Of course, it would be best to leave the volume number references to act 1 volumes alone at first. And I would volunteer to work on doing the changeover myself. -- William Ansley (talk) 13:04, March 5, 2014 (UTC) ::: So, the Chronology pages would be "Chronology - Volume 2-1" and so on ("Chronology - Volume 2-13" or beyond)? The code for generating volume numbers from dates would need to be changed -- right now it will return 14, and that will be translated to XIV by the code, but probably it wouldn't be too hard. Changing the titles to "Chronology - Act 2 Volume 1" would be harder, I think (but also clearer). ::: Changing the old volume numbers would involve changing the names of the existing cast and chronology pages -- but perhaps just forwarding the new names to the old would work. If we want to do that, then we would want to make the forwarding pages first and make sure they work before we revise the chronology volume template to generate the new names. ::: There's also the matter of the chronology toc. There was some mention of shortening the table (it's seven rows tall right now) once we got to volume 15. That's not something that needs to be figured out right away, tho' -- unlike the scheme we're going to use for the chronology. --Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 13:55, March 5, 2014 (UTC) :::: PS: If we are going to change the old names, then I'd go for the arabic scheme rather than roman -- Volume 1-1, 1-2, &c. --Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 13:57, March 5, 2014 (UTC) ::::: So there is a bit of rocket science, or at least coding, involved. Good to know. Thanks very much for the feedback. -- William Ansley (talk) 16:43, March 5, 2014 (UTC) If anyone has the time, choose something and go got it. If I had time I would create "Chronology - Volume 2-1" and see whether it works with current macros, and then when that worked try experimenting with how to get "Chronology - Act 2 Volume 1". Argadi (talk) 16:06, March 5, 2014 (UTC) : I'll see if I can find the time. -- William Ansley (talk) 16:43, March 5, 2014 (UTC) :: But if someone else can do it right away, please go ahead. -- William Ansley (talk) 17:07, March 5, 2014 (UTC) ::: I don't really have the time (but even so here I am), but I think we want to make sure we can generate 2-1 from 14 in the GG Volume macro. The current code is } }} |20021104 |20030512 |20031231 |20041004 |20050627 |20060310 |20070226 |20080204 |20090116 |20091214 |20101025 |20111107 |20121221}}}} ::: and what we want is the equivalent of: n = (Id index|id=...) if n > 13 return "2-"+(n-13) else return (RomanCaps|n) ::: I don't know how to create a local variable tho', and I don't know how to create a temporary template to play with.... Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 18:21, March 5, 2014 (UTC) :::GAH! I keep forgetting to sign things! Oh, well -- better late than never. ::: I have created a Template:Format_GG_Volume_Number that does the translation from raw volume number (1 to 14) into either Roman (1-XIII) or Act-Vol (2-1). I'm about to revise the Template:GG_Volume to use it. Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 18:21, March 5, 2014 (UTC) ::: Well, my new template seems to work on its own, but fails to work from the GG Volume template. I have copied the code from the includeonly part of the GG Volume template into the noinclude part of my new template, and it looks fine there (2-1). But in the noinclude part of the GG Volume template it comes out in roman (XIV). I've refreshed several times, no change. Used purge -- now an error message. ::: I'm resetting it to use RomanCaps -- I really have to go now! Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 18:58, March 5, 2014 (UTC) :::: I think you gave up too soon - you were probably too rushed. I re-modified the GG Volume template to use your new Format_GG_Volume_Number template and it seems to work fine now. I'm not sure about what needs to be done to update the Page-by-Page/Preload template, which is the next step in the "Regular Maintenance" list in the "For each new volume" section. I'll look at it again later today, if I can. (Sigh. I got logged out. I hate that.) -- William Ansley (talk) 23:20, March 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::: Thanks! I don't know what was going on with my attempt, but it was messy. Nice to see it's worked out now. Doktor Electrogeist (talk) 15:40, March 7, 2014 (UTC) :::::: Templates can be tricky to deal with. And development can be complicated by Wikia's caching of pages (at it's whim). It is sometimes useful to add ?action=purge to the end of URLs to tell Wikia to throw away the cached version for the page and read all of the templates again. Argadi (talk) 01:48, March 8, 2014 (UTC) ::::::: Ah, now that's a tip I'll have to remember! -- William Ansley (talk) 04:33, March 8, 2014 (UTC)